Freddie Starr And The Midnighters

Freddie Starr (born Frederick Leslie Fowell; 9 January 1943 – 9 May 2019) was an English stand up comedian, impressionist, singer and actor. Starr was the lead singer of Merseybeat rock and roll group the Midniters during the early 1960s, and came to prominence in the early 1970s after appearing on '' Opportunity Knocks'' and the Royal Variety Performance. In the 1990s, he starred in several television shows, including ''Freddie Starr'' (1993–1994), ''The Freddie Starr Show ''(1996–1998) and two episodes of '' An Audience with...'' in 1996 and 1997. In 1999, he presented the game show '' Beat the Crusher''.

Early life

Starr was born in Huyton in the county of Lancashire, England. One of seven children, Starr was the son of a bricklayer, who was often unemployed. According to Starr, his mother Hilda ('' née'' Feihnen) was from Germany and was Jewish. A twin brother died at birth. When his father, who was also a bare-knuckled boxer, was drunk he repeatedly beat Starr up when he was a young child. In one incident, his father broke both of his son's legs. At the age of six, Starr stopped speaking, and was taken into care. As a result of these experiences, he was teetotal for life. In his 2001 autobiography ''Unwrapped'', Starr gives speech problems as the reason he spent two years away from home as a child. He attended Sylvester's Primary, and later Huyton Secondary Modern. His father died when Starr was in his early teens.

Starr was encouraged by his mother to perform from the age of 12 working in clubs and pubs. For five years, he was a member of the Hilda Fallon Roadshow which toured community halls and hospitals.

Entertainment career

Under his birth name, he appeared as a teenager in the film ''Violent Playground'' (1958). In the early 1960s, Starr was the lead singer of the Merseybeat pop group The Midniters (also spelt as Midnighters) which was managed by Brian Epstein. The group recorded three singles, each produced by Joe Meek. The singles all failed to enter the charts. During this period Starr's group performed in Hamburg's nightclubs, around the same time as the Beatles.

Still relatively unknown to television audiences, Starr was "discovered" through the talent show, '' Opportunity Knocks'' in 1967 where he appeared as part of comedy/beat act Freddie Starr and the Delmonts, winning the popular vote each time over six weeks. He appeared as the second act on the 1970 Royal Variety Performance during which he did comedy impersonations of Cliff Richard, Tom Jones, Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Norman Wisdom and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. He was famous for impersonating Adolf Hitler in Wellington boots. During his career, he also impersonated Elvis Presley and Ray Charles. Starr had released a number of albums in his career, one of which yielded a UK Top 10 single, " It's You", in March 1974. Two of his albums charted: ''After the Laughter'' in 1989 and ''The Wanderer'' in 1990.

From 1972, he was one of the main performers in the television series '' Who Do You Do?'' and a regular on the TV panel show '' Jokers Wild''. A first attempt at his own series, ''Ready Freddie Starr'' (1974), was reduced to a single special programme because Starr had disputes with the production team at London Weekend Television (LWT). He later starred in his own BBC series in 1976. His wit, wrote Mark Lawson, "relied on broad punchlines and silly slapstick". Stuart Jeffries in his '' Guardian'' obituary of Starr wrote that his act was "pre-cerebral, unrepentantly sexist, often racist comedy that was rendered overwhelmingly obsolete by the late 1980s".

For 20 years, from 1974, Starr developed an addiction to Valium. The chat show host Michael Parkinson wrote that it "addled his talent and confused his personality", eroding "a virtuosity equalled by only a very few entertainers".

"Freddie Starr ate my hamster"

Freddie Starr was the subject of one of the best known British tabloid newspaper headlines. On 13 March 1986 '' The Sun'' carried as its main headline: "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster". According to the text of the story, Starr had been staying at the home of his friend Vince McCaffrey and his 23-year-old girlfriend Lea La Salle in Birchwood, Cheshire, when the alleged incident took place. Starr was claimed to have returned home from a performance at a Manchester nightclub in the early hours of the morning and demanded that La Salle make him a sandwich. When she refused, he went into the kitchen and put her pet hamster Supersonic between two slices of bread and proceeded to eat it.

Starr gave his own account of the story in his 2001 autobiography ''Unwrapped'', stating that the only time that he ever stayed at Vince McCaffrey's house was in 1979, and that the incident was a complete fabrication. Starr writes in the book: "I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal".

Initially the story had no effect on Starr's career but soon proved beneficial. Tickets for a forthcoming tour had been selling slowly but, after the headline in ''The Sun'', the publicity led to the addition of 12 dates to his itinerary and is believed to have boosted Starr's fee by one million.
The man behind the hamster story was the British publicist, Max Clifford, at that time Starr's agent, who concocted the story as a practical joke. When asked in a television interview with Esther Rantzen some years later whether Starr really had eaten a hamster, his reply was "Of course not". Clifford was unapologetic, insisting that the story had given a huge boost to Starr's career.

In May 2006, the BBC
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